


Some Little Oasis

by theoldgods



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: ALIE-Enhanced Minds, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friends to Lovers, Hand Jobs, M/M, Neck Kissing, Post-Season/Series 03, impending doom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-07-27 04:51:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7604176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is going to end, again, if that makes a difference considering what they've already lost and what Monty has done—now seemingly in vain—to try to keep them alive.</p><p>At least he has Jasper, as he has since long before they fell to Earth, even if neither of them can quite believe he deserves the other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Little Oasis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jiokra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jiokra/gifts).



> Written for M/M Rares 2016, for jiokra! I really enjoyed all your thoughts on these two and had fun writing them getting a bit of catharsis/hope as the world goes to shit, again. I hope you've had a good exchange!
> 
> This can be considered very slightly canon divergent in that I did not include Harper/Monty, but otherwise it should follow on immediately from the end of 3x16. The bits of science in this are....likely dodgy, in the same sense that canonical science is dodgy, but hopefully not too egregious.
> 
> Feel free to hit me up on [my tumblr](http://theoldgods.tumblr.com) if you want more Jonty/general The 100 content!

****He watches Jasper’s hand clench the bottle, fingers gone white around its neck, as if Bellamy’s voice is a byproduct of the moonshine and not the radio in Raven’s hand. He focuses on Jasper’s knuckles because that’s the easy and clearly sensible thing to do upon hearing that Earth, not content with one nuclear apocalypse, wants a second. He only meets Jasper’s eyes at the sound of Clarke’s voice over the radio, distant and apologetic.

“It’s insane, I know, but I don’t think—I don’t think ALIE can lie.”

Jasper sets the bottle on the floor, his hands shaking, though Monty is pretty sure it’s not from the booze, this time, given that he himself has had only a swig and is shaking nearly as badly.

“She can’t,” Jasper and Raven reply, their voices hoarse.

“Not about facts,” Raven adds, as Jasper begins pacing, his steps lurching with his injury. “Though context is a slippery beast. Can you—what  _exactly_ did she say?”

Monty should pay attention; he’s an engineer, after all, or something anyway, and this is so clearly and obviously important. Instead he watches Harper’s rigid face, the hollows under Jasper’s eyes and the traces of dried blood around the gunshot wound in his leg. He sits and runs fingers over his own wound, sharp lancing pain across his abdomen that makes the rest of the world go momentarily and blissfully white.

When Jasper, with a nod toward Raven, heads for the door, Monty follows him.

They leave the Ark—Arkadia—in silence. The world outside is green and calm, as eerily empty as ever but docilely so. _Earth does not care_ , Monty reminds himself, _and that’s good. That’s how we’re all still here—Earth is beyond humans. Earth survived one nuclear apocalypse, and it will survive ten more if it has to._

There are no Grounder warriors outside, of course, nothing but his own memories to make Monty shiver at how he let his love of—of _her_ blind him to what mattered. And here, right on time, is another reminder: _She’s dead. She might as well have never survived. And you will be dead because you cared more about one little person than the fact that the entire Earth is as uncaring as it ever was_.

“Could we have—if we hadn’t wasted time hunting Grounders—?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Jasper mutters, kicking at a log with his good leg before taking a seat on it. They’re just out of sight of Arkadia by now, wrapped in trees and an occasional echoing piece of birdsong. “We didn’t have a million eyes to see this shit, not then and not anymore.”

Monty considers that, watching the sky and choosing his next words even more carefully.

“Did you—when you were with ALIE—”

Jasper laughs, mirthless but not scathing, and Monty looks at him.

“The worst part is that you _want_ it. It’s so peaceful when you’re in the City, and when you’re with your body, here, well, everything she suggests is exactly what you want to do. It’s not like there’s a real you inside there somewhere, fighting her every step of the way. Well, maybe someone like Abby or Clarke or you would fight, but—”

“I doubt it,” Monty says, his breath burning his throat at the bitter uncertainty in Jasper’s eyes. “I couldn’t even stop Pike, not really, and for a while I didn’t _want_ to. I doubt I could fight ALIE.”

Jasper closes his eyes. “And that whole hivemind thing? I didn’t know everything she knew—some, mostly what she needed me to know for the moment, but sometimes little bits and pieces picked up elsewhere, like her urgency. If a computer can be urgent. And I didn’t _know_ what to know, not like Raven.”

“So maybe Raven could remember something from her about the upcoming nuclear apocalypse.”

“I really hope she can save our asses,” Jasper murmurs, opening his eyes again. Monty’s laugh bursts from him, and Jasper smiles for a moment. “She and you could probably do it. Doesn’t there have to be a way? Isn’t that fate, or God, or something?”

“This isn’t a story.” Monty looks at the empty spot next to Jasper on the log, and Jasper, with a brusque nod, slides down to make room. The wood beneath Monty’s ass is hard and scratchy, and yet it also _smells_ , rich and heady, a sensation a thousand descriptions of Earth could never truly explain. “If it is, it’s an infuriating one. I’d say that I can’t believe Earth is doing this to us yet again, but I really, honestly can.”

“We came down too early,” Jasper agrees, picking at a loose piece of bark. “If there’s fate or whatever, we definitely fucked up our appointment time. This wasn’t supposed to be _our_ generation doing all this shit.”

“I guess if we’d all waited, Earth would’ve melted again anyway, and then nobody would ever have been able to come down.”

Jasper’s eyes trace the path of a bird overhead. When he speaks, his voice is quieter.

“I still wait to wake up from this dream, some days. Some mornings I don’t remember where I am at first.”

Monty snorts. “And you think you’re in that shithole cabin, almost late to breakfast for the thousandth day in a row?”

“I find myself in the sky box, waiting to be kicked off into outer space, really. Though I guess we _were_ floated.”

Monty smirks at that. Here they are, criminals or delinquents or whatever, watching Earth go to shit all around them for the millionth time in the scant few months they’ve been down here, and yet he feels only its sheer beauty, a perverse and desperate happiness to go along with the knowledge that there is an extremely good chance they will never actually be able to _live_ here.

“First people in the history of the Ark to survive floating, I guess that’s us.” When Jasper laughs, lighter and freer than before, Monty feels his chest tighten. “And, yeah, I never expected it. You know me. Never expected to actually go to Earth, never expected to _survive_ falling through the sky onto an irradiated Earth, never expected to survive the first night.”

“Never expected to survive the second apocalypse.”

“I guess my track record with this kind of thing is pretty shitty.” Monty smiles. “I think the only thing I got was that we could make it.”

“That I could stop being a worthless drunk, you mean.” Jasper shoots Monty a silencing look when he opens his mouth to argue. “I could stop being completely fucking useless while all of our already shitty society fell apart around us.”

“Jasper, you were _right_ to be upset.” Monty is startled to find a tear growing in the corner of his eye. “I helped kill a girl you loved. You said as much before, and you were right.”

“Yeah, well, like I eventually figured out—the rest of you got kicked around too and didn't lose your minds.”

“I think I have, though.” There's no hiding the wobble to Monty’s voice, the water trickling down one cheek, and he knows intellectually, even if his face has grown red with shame, that there's no need to. “I shot my own fucking mother and then I deleted her mind and I don't think I've stopped glitching inside since.”

Jasper’s intake of breath is rough. “She—ALIE sent her again, didn't she, while you and Raven were hacking?”

“It’s only logical,” Monty grumbles, his voice bitter beneath his tears. His throat aches. “She probably didn’t think I’d kill my own mother twice.”

Jasper’s hand on his shoulder burns through the fabric of his shirt. Monty buries his head in the crook of his arm, fights back sputtering sobs as Jasper rubs, his touch uncertain but warm. Monty grips back, digging his fingers into Jasper’s arm.

“Earth is shit,” Jasper murmurs, his voice, rough and watery, near Monty’s ear. “If it’s not one damn thing it’s another.”

“Mass murder, matricide—I had to. Still did them. Still _guilty_ of far worse than stealing some damn herbs. Didn’t deserve that shit then, but I do now.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve already been floated. Together.”

Jasper tightens his grip on Monty’s shoulder. Monty lets one genuine sob slip between his lips, just the one, just a moment—and bursts inside, silent tears streaming hot down his face as his breath catches, again and again, shallow and harsh in his lungs, a pain sharper even than his stab wound and black instead of white on the insides of his closed eyelids.

When the tears and pain dissipate some, Monty opens his eyes to the blurry picture of Jasper’s head on his shoulder, a warm weight anchored by the two bright, wet points of his own eyes, so very close to Monty’s face. Monty swallows once and then again, his heart leaping, incongruously, in something suspiciously close to a black joy.

“I’m glad I helped you steal those fucking things.”

Jasper laughs, because of course he does, wet and soft and familiar as he hasn’t been since Mount Weather, and Monty, floating in some haze of simultaneous sorrow and relief, joins in.

“If we’re going to die on Earth, this is the way to do it.” Jasper touches Monty’s chin with trembling fingers, and Monty closes his eyes again at the ripple of heat under his skin. They’re back in the starboard window bay, sharing herb and scattered glances and accidental touches, with nothing but a whole long life trapped in their floating world ahead of him, Earth an impossible dream and not a crushing nightmare. “Miserable and desperate and together.”

“On which planet would you rather?”

Jasper’s other hand brushes Monty’s fingers, a soft and skittering touch. “Yeah,” he whispers, his voice burbling with something aside from tears, something Monty suspects might be wonder. “It’s still Earth.”

Monty wraps his fingers around Jasper’s, and they sit, hand in hand and in silence, until they hear the sounds of the others returning from Polis.

* * *

Jackson says nothing about their puffy faces, not that he would have much leeway to talk, considering his own bruises. He treats Monty first, despite Monty’s protests otherwise.

“The abdomen is much more serious than the leg,” Jackson says, pushing Monty gently back against the wall.

Jasper, seated watching on a neighboring bed, grins. “Screwdriver beats gun.”

“We already bandaged it.” Monty grimaces as Jackson begins peeling away said wrappings. “Jasper’s probably still bleeding somewhere. And we should really be in that meeting anyway.”

Jasper leans back against his bed. “And listen to people scream and sob? Already got that down, really.”

Monty’s mouth twists, though he doesn’t reply.

Jackson works quickly and silently, his hands sturdy despite the exhaustion in his eyes and his own injuries. He’s always been focused, Monty assumes—he’s a doctor, that’s part of the gig—but there’s a scary level of intent and determination there now. A dumb idea comes into his head, and because this is the end of the world, yet again, he voices it.

“Are you better than you used to be, Jackson? Because of—because of ALIE?”

Jackson pulls the stitch he’s currently setting somewhat harder than is probably necessary, causing Monty to yelp. “ALIE wasn’t exactly big on doctoring and all that, sort of busy with the whole ‘capturing minds’ thing.”

“Yeah,” Monty agrees, watching out of the corner of his eye as Jasper’s fists clench. His own throat tightens in sympathy. “Sorry.”

Jackson clicks his tongue but smiles.

Once he’s moved onto Jasper, Monty finds he can’t take his thoughts away from the idea that, somehow, being entangled with ALIE might have helped Jackson in some way. It seems to have made Raven a far faster and more intuitive programmer, for one thing, on the edge of superhuman. If ALIE could still help them from beyond her electronic grave, without them having to give themselves up completely—

His musings are interrupted by the arrival of Abby, pale and determined and with a dark ring of bruises around her neck that she ignores as she asks Jackson after their status.

“They’ll survive,” Jackson tells her, not quite meeting her eyes as he puts the finishing touches on Jasper’s own small row of stitches. “ALIE doesn’t get either of them.”

Abby rests a hand on Jackson’s shoulder; he leans away from her touch, gently but firmly. Jasper looks from Abby to Jackson and back again, and his mouth opens in a soft “oh.”

“I—I think I saw, for a second, back when we were still fighting.” Both doctors turn in his direction; Jasper blushes but continues. “In the...the throne room, just a few flashes of other people that I think I...tried to forget.”

“Where I tried to kill Abby, however briefly,” Jackson confirms, his muscles tensing as he steps back. “You both should stay here for a bit, rest up.”

“That’s an order,” Abby adds, before Monty can even open his mouth to complain. “Please.” Her voice is stern but soft, and she trembles, barely visibly. “We’ve all seen so much today. This week.”

“This life.” Jasper drums his fingertips on the knee of his good leg. Abby nods.

“Is the meeting over?” Monty asks, shifting so that he’s more comfortable. “Did we decide anything?”

Abby smiles. “Fucking nothing.” It might be the first time Monty has heard her swear, and the perfect incongruity of it and the desperation of his even asking—of course they haven’t; that would be too easy—makes him choke on a laugh. On the other bed, Jasper joins in, and Abby continues smiling, bleak and yet determined. “Mostly it’s a lot of horror and trying to figure out what it even means. I’m of more use trying to straighten up Medical.”

Monty waits until Jackson has left before trying out his theory on Abby. He has to; Jasper’s whispered admission of shared minds, other people’s and not just the great central whatever of ALIE herself, has set something he doesn’t understand humming at the back of his mind. “Abby, is there—Jasper saw other people, I guess—” Jasper grunts in acknowledgment “—and Raven is really good at programming now. Really, really, superhumanly fast, like some little part of her is still ALIE.”

Abby’s spine stiffens, though she does not falter as she sorts through a pile of supplies. “Now _that_ is a piece of horror.”

“Are you—”

“A computer genius now?” Abby raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think so. Not that I know of, though I haven’t tried.” She frowns. “My mind won’t settle. It's somewhat more focused than just distraction or emotion.”

Jasper looks at the ceiling. “It’s like someone’s running at the back of my head, empty, nothing to go through or do, but they won’t stop. It only stopped when—” he hesitates, shooting Monty a glance “—when I was talking with Monty for a while earlier.”

 _When we were crying_. _When we were otherwise occupied._ Monty’s heart thuds. “A computer, without a program to run?”

Abby stops sorting, rubs a palm across her pants. “I’m not sure I’m interested in being some sort of half-cyborg for the rest of my life.” She grimaces. “Though I’m also not sure we have a choice.”

“It might fade,” Monty argues, while Jasper looks back and forth between Abby and him. “What if we gave it a task anyway?”

“What if we told some remnant of ALIE inside of us to go figure out how to save the world?”

Monty cringes, because it sounds incredibly stupid when put that way, and here he is, never been chipped himself and yet telling everyone else how to go about dealing with it. “Metaphorically speaking. If nothing else, Raven can go through information a lot faster now, or at least she could before ALIE completely died. Maybe it’s different when the base system is shot. But there’s got to be all sorts of information in the Ark systems, more than anyone could normally ever go through—”

“Ninety-six percent, Clarke said,” Abby murmurs. “That’s how much of Earth will allegedly be uninhabitable within six months. I’m afraid that we can’t stop it. But four percent could still be there, regardless.”

“Some little oasis, like Luna’s rig.” Jasper swallows but nods, determined. “ALIE knew that four percent, at least. If she knew it, we can figure it out too. It would take an inhuman amount of time, probably, to check everything and figure out where you could still live after another apocalypse, but I’d test it and see. Maybe I _am_ a little bit computer now, at least for a while.”

“It might be on the other side of the world and thus completely useless to us,” Monty says.  _Knowing our luck, it probably would be_. “Somewhere we couldn’t get to within six months even if we wanted to.”

“We still have to know.” Abby starts for the door. “Please stay still, for just a little while. I will go back in there and see.” She’s gone before either can reply.

“She said ‘please,’” Jasper notes, leaning back against the wall. “And my leg does still hurt.”

“Almost like you’re wounded.” Monty grins despite himself. “Would a massage help?”

Jasper twitches his toes. “Please.”

Monty has never been the best massage giver—too mechanical and not enough emotion, he assumes—but he goes to Jasper gladly. If nothing else, being near him is some little piece of contentment in the not-happy-not-miserable-not-alive-not-dead existential limbo that is life on the ground (and was life on the Ark, too, if Monty wants to be honest—humanity has maybe always been living on borrowed time).

Jasper’s skin is hairy and rough and hot beneath Monty’s fingers. ( _Solid, alive, unchipped_ , Monty thinks, tightening his grip.) His breathing evens out almost the moment Monty touches him, and he falls asleep within five minutes. Monty, tired and cried out and miserable and hopeful, kneeling on the floor next to Jasper’s bed, presses his forehead gently against Jasper’s knee and waits for Abby to return.

* * *

Raven thinks Monty and Jasper might be onto something with the “look through every piece of the surviving knowledge of humanity” thing, enough so that she gladly sets her ALIE-enhanced brain to the sifting task. Two days and endless rounds of meetings later, no one is any closer to knowing how to stop a global nuclear meltdown, but they’ve at least got ports to the old Ark mainframe open on every available screen.

Raven knocked out a shaky system to help look and categorize for them, some idea pulled from her own mind that no one wants to look too closely at, considering that they’ll probably never know whether it’s Raven’s idea or the ghost of ALIE’s or if there’s even a difference anymore. Monty, lacking speedreading and speedorganizing skills of his own since he’s never had an AI grafted into his mind, uses it as best he can.

Jasper, who never scored very highly in any programming classes on the Ark and was always an average reader at best, can now read and analyze information, coded or not, at least as quickly as Monty can.

He’s taken to his new superpower with subdued goodwill, currently sitting in front of a nearby monitor reading through information on the last known nuclear reactors on the Pacific Rim. There were a lot built in the years leading up to humanity’s first death, so Monty privately doubts that there’s much of a chance of that area of the world remaining untouched by another nuclear meltdown, but information is information, particularly when you can parse it as quickly as those who have been chipped can.

Abby enters the room at some point when it’s not dark outside—time is a nebulous concept, lost in computer screens and endless hastily traced maps and schemata of nuclear reactors. When she enters Monty is watching the program scroll through what appear to be alphabetized indices of the known surviving literature of the Indian subcontinent, marking them as probably unhelpful; Raven is fitfully asleep on a nearby couch, her limbs occasionally jerking as the ALIE-tinged portions of her brain search for things to do, even in unconsciousness.

“There’s a lot of information on nuclear reactors in Japan,” Jasper whispers when Abby reads over his shoulder. “Even on when they melt down.”

“As they’re prone to do,” Abby whispers back, a rueful smile on her face. “When’s the last time you slept, Jasper?”

Jasper rolls his eyes. “I’m not tired. And look at Raven—I probably couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to.”

Abby frowns thoughtfully at Raven, though she doesn’t move from Jasper’s side. “If we’re all going to be half computers for the foreseeable future, we still need to know how to stop and cool down. Isn’t that so, Monty?”

Monty fights down a laugh at the idea of Jasper the Supercomputer. “Uh, I guess?” His eyes _are_ aching; whenever they last moved, it wasn’t very recently. “Jasper, yeah, you should probably take a break. No use reading forever if you’re just going to kill yourself in the process.”

“I will if you will.”

It’s Abby’s turn to laugh, soft and knowing, raising goosebumps on the back of Monty’s neck. “Medical is quiet for the moment; I can keep an eye on things here, make sure Raven’s program doesn’t destroy itself. Take a break, both of you.”

When they emerge from the room, it’s to find it still an hour or two before sunset, the western sky turning orange. Jasper sighs at the sight.

“Six months left of this.”

Monty’s stomach flips. In the hours of constant reading and thinking, he had forgotten to feel fear or despair, but when he’s turned loose, it all comes rushing back. He walks as slow as Jasper, with his gunshot wound, does, to avoid angering his own wound as well as because heavy dread has sunk into his stomach and thighs.

They return to their log, where it is silent and half dark already due to the copse of trees. Monty’s hands shake; he closes his eyes and lets himself imagine Jasper’s head on his shoulder again, blending in and out with the pressure of the floor as he kneels with his head on Jasper’s knee and those happy days of smoking and dreaming on the Ark.

“Would it be better if we just all exploded one day? No wait, no dread?”

Monty considers. The answer is _yes_ , because of course it would be; he does not want to watch himself and the remaining members of the human race—does not want to watch _Jasper_ —slowly die of radiation poisoning. This time there would be no savior, no super-superirradiated human, immune to even the worst radiation, to pull blood from like the Mountain Men had done to them; Monty tells himself they could never do that anyway, never treat anyone like they had been treated, but he knows it’s a lie, that if someone else’s blood could keep those he’s come to love alive, he would not be able to stop himself.

“I think it would be,” Jasper continues, voice small. “No pain, right? But at the same time, I don’t want it to end. Not when there’s still—not when there’s still so much we don’t know.”

 _There’s more information in the Ark than even Raven’s program can probably get through_ , Monty thinks, but he does not say it out loud; Jasper doesn’t need his newfound ability to sort and process through information at nearly superhuman speeds to know the improbability, if not the impossibility, of the task fate has set them. And that’s not what he means, Monty senses, not the sort of knowledge Jasper has ever truly wanted.

“Yesterday Clarke asked me if I would forgive her.”

Monty blinks and shifts. “For Mount Weather?”

“For killing ALIE.”

Monty looks at Jasper at that.

“We...met, while she was in there,” Jasper whispers. His cheeks are red. “I was to plead with her to stay, that it was good and peaceful.”

“And you wanted to stay.” Monty remembers their previous conversation. He can’t say that he blames Jasper, not when the alternative is a slow and torturous death.

“Yes.” Jasper’s blush deepens. “It was a dream, a literal dream, the most perfect fantasy of Earth like we used to joke about, and I wanted to stay. And I was promised so much. I was promised peace and happiness, and the best kind of love, without any horror attached.”

“Did she promise you Maya?”

It’s a dangerous question, Monty knows it’s a dangerous question, but he asks it anyway, out of morbid curiosity of ALIE’s powers. If he had been in there, he would have actually had his mother, and while he doesn’t think ALIE is capable of restoring the dead who weren’t already chipped into her, maybe she could make a passable hologram from Jasper’s memories.

“She said she could work up to it.” Jasper’s face is now redder than the sunset, and he won’t meet Monty’s gaze. “My own fucking fake dead not-really-girlfriend as a forever hologram. Makes me dizzy to think about it now. And in the meantime, she said, she’d give me you if I brought you to her.”

His first thought is to laugh, though he subdues that almost as soon as it occurs to him, and his second instinct is to smile and that might almost be worse. “But I wasn’t there.” He isn’t going deeper than this level ( _silly ALIE promising Jasper people she doesn’t have control over, isn’t that funny, laugh at what could have been and don’t wonder why you’re equatable to Maya_ ), he isn’t, he can’t. “Though I probably would have gone. If I had to.”

“Yeah?” Jasper still isn’t looking at him

“If I were with you…” Monty swallows. “I would probably be happy regardless, ALIE or no ALIE. And if it’s the perfect fantasy Earth, I think we belong together.”

“On which planet would you rather.”

A statement, not a question, but Monty answers anyway. “With you, on every planet. Even this shitty hell version of Earth.” He smiles. “Probably _especially_ this shitty hell version of Earth, to be honest.”

Jasper takes Monty’s hand in his, as gentle and uncertain as they were a few days before, and Monty tightens his grip. His heart is tumbling at the base of his throat, and it’s like the fever dreams he’s had before in his life, he and Jasper alone together, bodies tangled together coated in sweat, not the only sexual dream he’s had in his life by a long shot but the one that leaves him the happiest and the most confused upon waking, because Jasper is worth so much more than just that.

He _would_ , he would touch Jasper like that if Jasper wanted it. Anything for his friend, the other half of him he knows now that he’ll take in whatever way works for them. Part of him would do it no matter what, so long as Jasper wanted it, so long as it made Jasper happy; the prudent part of him would do it only if it would not destroy what they already have, a promise he suspects is impossible for anyone to keep.

“As much as this planet absolutely sucks, I have you.” Jasper walks his fingers through Monty’s; Monty shivers, unable to move. “I think ALIE knew that, knew that you were—you are—my anchor, of sorts, even when I don’t deserve you.”

“You _always_ deserve an anchor.” Monty almost spits it. “One better than me. How can I be your anchor when you’re mine, when I felt so bad that _you_ felt so bad? When I’m the one with so much innocent blood on my hands, and you still associate with me and soothe me even if you hate—”

“I don’t hate you.” Jasper leans his forehead against Monty’s, and Monty stops breathing for a moment. “I tried, because I hated myself for being involved and needed to spread the pain, and I couldn’t. I needed you. I lo—I loved you.”

Monty touches one hand to Jasper’s cheek; Jasper leans forward, until the tip of Monty’s finger brushes his lips.

 _I can’t ruin us._ He’s going to anyway; he can feel it bursting behind his sternum, all his sweaty dreams coated in the dying sunlight around them. _I won’t ruin us. I won’t destroy the one good thing in my last six months of life._

Jasper touches Monty’s lip. Monty closes his eyes and closes the gap between them.

Jasper’s lips are warm and dry beneath his. They’ve seen each other naked before, in the casual way of friends, touched and wrestled and argued and fought. He’s cried on Jasper’s shoulder about how he killed his own mother, on this very rock, scarcely two days before this. He has never before touched Jasper’s mouth with his own hands, never mind with his mouth, and he’s smiling before they’ve kissed for even two seconds.

Jasper threads the fingers of one hand through Monty’s hair, and Monty whimpers; when Jasper begins tracing patterns against Monty’s scalp, Monty rubs his neck in return, drawing out a moan.

Monty transfers his mouth to that same spot on Jasper’s neck, and Jasper gasps, then laughs. “Please.”

Monty smiles against his skin. “Please yes or please no?”

“Please yes, do that forever, and please no, don’t stop.”

It’s all so playful and easy, as if they’ve kissed a thousand times before. Jasper’s smell is familiar, as is his laugh, the way he wheezes barely audibly on the intake of air, the twitch of his arm muscles in reaction to the tickling. They fall slowly to the ground, Jasper’s neck arched back against grass and dirt, the sunlight leaving a golden-red trail up to his nose that stops Monty’s heart for a moment before he buries his face into that skin and kisses, alternating feather-light touches and harder sucks as Jasper cries out.

“God, why is this so good?”

“Because it’s me.”

Monty feels somewhat stupid giving this sort of talk, brash and overconfident and probably more than faintly absurd, but Jasper only wheezes harder in delight under him.

“Yes, of course.” Jasper slides a hand against Monty’s chest, slipping below the hem of his shirt, and Monty kisses harder. “May I?”

Monty pulls at his zipper the best he can without taking his mouth from Jasper’s neck, and Jasper continues to laugh under his breath as he gently removes Monty’s hand and slides in against his cock.

The touch of Jasper’s hand on Monty is a zap of energy up his spine, there and gone before Monty can even really register it, and yet some low, happy noise falls out of Monty’s mouth nonetheless. Monty places one hand on the other side of Jasper’s neck and continues working with his tongue as Jasper circles the head of his cock with rough and solid fingers.

“Lower,” Monty murmurs eventually, pulling off to investigate the tinge of color growing beneath his mouth. “Please, the whole—ah!”

Jasper obeys, running his hand down to Monty’s balls for only a moment before gripping the middle of his shaft, a firm touch that has Monty’s vision momentarily blur. His strokes are steady, remarkably deft considering his lack of leverage in their current situation, and Monty leaves off working Jasper’s neck as his legs and arms begin to tingle.

When Monty comes, still half in his pants, about two minutes later, it’s with his forehead pressed into the dirt next to Jasper and one hand flexing against Jasper’s chest. He lies still, panting, until he feels Jasper rub at his own cock through his pants. Monty pushes his face back against Jasper’s neck and reaches down to open Jasper’s zipper, curling his hand around the bulge in his underwear that twitches, as if it were autonomously alive, against him.

Jasper, so loud and boisterous in their earliest days, so somber and bitter for the past four months, is quiet and smiling as Monty strokes, and when he releases, hot and sticky between Monty’s fingers, it’s with possibly the most contented sigh Monty has ever heard. Monty rubs his hand dry on the grass beneath them as he finishes sucking at Jasper’s neck, breathing in the scents of semen, sweat, and dirt and feeling Jasper’s pulse begin to slow beneath the occasional flick of his tongue.

“I don’t know what the rush was,” Monty admits a few minutes later, as Jasper works fingers back and forth across the nape of his neck, sending happy shivers down to his feet.

“I’ll say it’s because we still have to save mankind,” Jasper murmurs, dragging his fingertips through the part of Monty’s hair, warm and lingering against his scalp. “Not because we’re bad at this.”

Monty groans. “I almost forgot.”

“ _Almost_.” Jasper kisses him, on his lips, slow and soft, and Monty’s mind goes blissfully blank, white like the worst throb from his wound but without any of the pain. As Monty rolls away, stretching his limbs, he watches Jasper touch the bruise blooming on his neck. “Excellent.”

“It’s okay?” Monty had figured Jasper would tell him to stop if it weren’t, that Jasper would have known exactly what would result from such sucking, but the smile on Jasper’s face sends some sort of relief through him nonetheless.

“It felt so good.” Jasper sits up, redoing his pants and resettling his shirt as Monty does the same, and he makes no move to cover the splotch of reddish-purple just above his collarbone. “And, I dunno, it might be easier than words.”

It will certainly be easier than words. It will certainly result in looks at the very least, probably teasing from Raven. And that moment of lightheartedness will be very much welcome before they confront again exactly how many nuclear reactors there are on the surface of Earth, how impossible they all are to reach or to escape.

Jasper meets his eyes with his own, takes Monty’s hand in both of his. “Here at the end of all things.”

Jasper always did love his old fantasy stories, be they about Earth or some other world, and Monty isn’t going to complain about a little bit of hope.

“I’m glad to be with you.”

And he is.


End file.
